SummaryIf the Z3 has a good price, the new-found access to Android apps could make a value for money purchase

Despite the robustness of its devices and sophistication of its operating system, a lot of users have been staying away from BlackBerry phones. They have one big grouse: the platform does not give access to most of the apps that people like to have on their smartphones these days like Instagram, Zite and the Chrome browser.

But with its new OS upgrade BlackBerry OS 10.2.1, the Canadian smartphone company has opened up its OS to Android apps. No users still can’t go to Google Play and download apps, but a lot of third party apps stores work quite well on the new breed of BlackBerry devices.

We have written about the new features on BlackBerry 10.2.1. So this time we decided to check out how easy it is to install and run Android apps on a BlackBerry Z30.

There are many options to side-load Android apps on a BlackBerry. Here we look at three and tell you what works best.

OPTION 1: The easiest way is to mail yourself an APK, which can then be downloaded and installed. However, this method strangely had a poor success rate. Worked for me with only one of the five apps I tried.

OPTION 2: Snap, is an app that brings Google Play to a BlackBerry and should hence be the easiest, at least on paper. But we could not get to load the app despite our best attempts.

OPTION 3: We then tried a third party app store called APK Train on the browser. This was the closest one could get to Google Play on the BlackBerry. The app store is clean and easy to use. It has a top apps section as well as a search option. Within minutes I had all the apps I had running on my Android device on the Z30.

The apps downloaded and installed within seconds. Of the dozen-odd apps that I downloaded, I could not get the Google Chrome browser to load. It kept crashing, as if reminding us that it was not made for this platform.

OTHER OPTIONS: You can check out other third party app stores like Amazon to see if it works for you. If it does not, there is always option 3 to fall back on. The good thing here is that there is at least one option that works seamlessly.